The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialised UN agency, and a member organisation of the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development, works to eradicate rural poverty in 115 countries. Its 2008 operating programme of work of $650 million is devoted to a programme of loans and grants currently totalling some 200 projects, especially in remote, drought-prone rural areas like Sub-Saharan Africa. In the face of a worsening worldwide food-price crisis, IFAD President Lennart Båge is leading a campaign to convince governments and donors that developing country small farmers are now essential to ensure food security, spur economic growth and help mitigate climate change. He spoke to Timothy Nater at IFAD headquarters in Rome.
Nater: What is your take on the global food price crisis?
Båge: It’s refocusing attention on agriculture and food for obvious reasons: dramatic price rises, rioting, and a severe impact on poor families, food security and country budgets. But behind the immediate causes like the rise in oil prices, the use of grain for biofuels and climate change lies the fact that agriculture investment, especially in developing countries, is very much a 30-year legacy of neglect.
Senior African officials used to tell me that, for many years, it was cheaper to buy food on international markets than to invest in growing it at home. Dumping and export subsidies by exporting countries had made for very low global prices, so why use precious resources on agricultural investment, they used to ask, when cheap food is out there in abundance?
“For too long, we've taken food for granted. We cannot go on like this.”
The result was an inelastic, distorted agricultural system and the crisis that is now unfolding before our eyes. The real problems haven't been taken seriously enough by governments, by many aid donors and most of the development community. The figures tell the story: 20% of ODA went to agriculture in the early 1980s, but that was down to 2.9% by 2006.
We have to invest in a global system that is strong, resilient and can absorb the sort of shocks we’re seeing today. It's in the interest not only of human dignity, nutrition and food security at national level, but also of global stability and international security. In countries where 50-60 % of most people's money goes on food, if food prices go up 50% or 100%, that's not only a slide back into poverty and malnutrition, that’s the destruction of decades of progress in development.
What’s to be done?
The immediate response, and rightly so, is to feed hungry people. The most urgent call has been to restore the purchasing power of the World Food Programme so they can feed the 17 million-plus people in their care.
The world has heard that call, hasn’t it?
The rapid, high-supply response will likely come from big commercial agricultural producers in Europe, North America and Latin America. There's a tremendous new boost of planting in OECD and other advanced agricultural producing countries, so, sooner or later, the supply response at the global level will ease the crisis.
But while all of that is sorely needed, of course, I see a risk, from a global perspective. If we forget the 400 million smallholders and their potential, we actually may get a situation where, while meeting the world’s immediate supply targets, we wind up with an even greater imbalance in the global supply system. Yes, we must gear up an emergency response to feed people and provide input support to ensure higher productive output for the coming harvests, but we must not forget medium- and long-term investment in policies, institutions, productivity, irrigation and soil fertility. If you look only at the immediate emergency, you undermine the long-term solution – and you get more food aid dependency.
